I have more than few clients that would like to add facebook connect to their landing pages (managed by me). They are too many and not enough tech-savvy to manually create ad appid for each of them.
So my only solution is to usa my own appid to add facebook connect to all my clients websites, but as far as I know, Facebook doesn't allow to simply use the same appid on any domain.
How can I solve this? I can't find any documentation to solve my issue. Does anyone have a direction for me?
This has been discussed a couple o’ times before already – but I mostly commented on earlier questions, so let me write the whole thing up as a proper answer, for future reference.
[paraphrased] Multiple-client Facebook login via one single app id
Does anyone have a direction for me?
You probably rather don’t want to do that.
It is not really possible to run one simple app one multiple different domains.
As a workaround for only a few domains, people used to specify different domains for the different platforms – Website, Page Tab or Canvas App, plus Mobile alternative for Canvas – without actually using any of those platforms besides Website, which made the app usable on multiple domains as a website app. But since Facebook introduced their login/permission review process¹, you can’t do that any more – they expect you to present actual functionality on all platforms you have configured in your app.
You can kind-off use one single app for login on multiple domains – if you are willing to use only the server-side login flow, and to redirect users to one “main” domain (that gets specified as the app domain in the app settings) to login, and then from there back to the origin domain.
But this has several drawbacks:
It’s not what you’d call a “white label” solution. If your clients expect it to look as if users where logging in via “their” app, it should stay on their domain. Individual branding, in regard to stuff such as app name, app logo that shows in the login dialog, etc., would also not be possible. Additionally, app attribution – the link that shows up under content shared/posted via the app – would only link users back to the main domain, and not to your customer’s.
You would not be able to use the JS SDK for client-side API requests, or even just to embed it to render any of the FB social plugins that require an app id – the SDK checks what domain it is “running on”, and can not be tricked to accept a domain that is not specified in the app settings.
There could be privacy issues. An over-exaggerated example: Just because I as the app user decided to share my photos or videos I have on Facebook with your customer Our-Holy-Mother-of-Christ-Bakery.com, does not necessarily mean I want to share them with your other customer, amateurs-doing-all-kinds-of-nasty-stuff.xxx as well – but if they shared an app id for login purposes, I automatically would. Have fun writin’ the Privacy Policy (which is mandatory if you use FB login functionality, and FB also automatically checks if your app has got one) for that scenario ;-)
Finally, and most importantly: All your customers would be “sitting in the same boat.” If one of them, or in turn their website users, would publish spam via your app id, so that Facebook blocks it, login would not work any more for all of your customer’s websites. And if you decide only then, that setting up an individual app for each of your customers would be the better way to go, they would not be able to recognize their existing users any more, because of user ids being app-scoped since API v2.0 was introduced – so if users logged into this new app, that app would see a totally different user id. (And to rely on an email address as an identifier is risky, too, because you will not get one from the API for every user; for example if they registered using their mobile device.)
Edit: Plus, app/domain insights, as luschn mentioned in his answer.
¹ Yes, the review process has made it more laborious to set up multiple apps for multiple clients. But for apps that do the same stuff/use the same permissions in the same manner, you can refer to an earlier successfully reviewed app id to speed up the process a little. Also, screenshots of how f.e. posts made via the app look on timeline, and what UI components are used, as well as screencasts that you include in your submission could probably be used with little to no alteration.
Apps are not meant be used on several different domains, you will have to create a new App for each domain, i´m afraid. You can use the different platforms in the App settings to use different domains, but there are only a few so it´s pointless. Just create some screenshots and a tutorial for your clients, that´s how it is usually done.
Btw, it would be weird to authorize an App on a website, and the same App would allow you to be authorized on all other client websites. Also, insights are per App, so your clients may want to see their own insights and not the global insights of all domains together.
Many is not defined but i think for being a smart developer you need to create new app_ids for every project you need to use facebook connect. Just my opinion. It also allows you to monitor alot of stuff.
We have a software platform with Social Logins, and Facebook is one of them. However, we at times whitel-label our domain name to the client. e.g. client.isebox.net becomes isebox.clientdomain.com
The Facebook App settings allow for, what seems, a finite (e.g. ONE) number of Site URLs - however it allows for many APP DOMAINS.
We're trying to achieve using our platform social login across all our clients without creating an appID for each new domain.
For now, I've been able to "hack" the system by adding the clients domain name into "Mobile URL"... since we don't use this field, it has accepted the clients domain name in "App Domains" since we've added it to the Mobile URL field.
This is likely an incorrect approach. In fact, certainly is. But it works. However it will not work for our next client, as there are no more URL fields available. :)
Does anyone have any tips for how our App should work and be configured if we are using our application across various domain names?
Thanks, Community!
Salvatore
I want to add the facebook comment box to several websites for different people. IT asks for an Appid which at first I thought meant their Facebook Business page id. Now im realizing that I need to create a Facebook App for this. My question is this, can I create one app, take the ID and use that for several different comment boxes on various sites that are not related and owned by different clients? Or should I make new Apps for each one?
Thanks
The comment boxes are separated by the URL you define in the HTML attributes, so technically you can use the same App ID for multiple clients since the pages have different URLs.
Still - I would advise you to create a new application for each client. At some point one client might ask you to give them admin access to the Facebook application - and you don't want to give one client access to the application that also serves your other clients...
I've built a tiny FB app whose purpose is to get the user's public profile URL. I have used the client-side authentication example provided, and it works just fine. I have also setup an application on Facebook.com so I can provide an APP ID. For this use, I have left App Domains blank, and made the app the type "Website with Facebook Login". And then I supply the "Site URL", the callback.
My trouble is that my web application runs across multiple domains. Individual customers have their own unique subdomain on our main domain. Do I have to create a new application for every single subdomain? It appears that way now, which would lead to hundreds — possibly thousands — of applications just to get a working callback URL for every customer domain.
Is there an easier way to do this?
For this use, I have left App Domains blank
You might want to reconsider that; especially you might want to read the explanation text for “App Domain” parameter that hovering over the [?] shows …
I'm attempting to develop my first Facebook app that is designed to allow clients of our website to sell tickets to their events from their Facebook page as well as from our website. So when the administrator of a Facebook page adds our app as a page tab, I need to be able to find out who they are so I can load the relevant event data. There also needs to be additional include/exclude configurations and various other options, which will affect the behaviour of the app.
So my question is how is this situation best handled? When playing around with a basic sandboxed app, I seem to be able to just add the app directly to a page; there is no prompt for configuration, and I can't see any way of defining custom properties.
Is the 'edit_url' property the only way to achieve this? If so, is there a way of automatically directing the page admin to this link upon initial use?
Decoding the signed request recieved in your page will give you more insight.
From this you can retrieve page admins' UID's.
You'll need to manage the rest on your side...
In order to get the user id the user will have to grant your application basic permissions.
I'm currently doing a somewhat similar app and, just like Lix said, I used the signed_request variable to detect the page where the tab is installed. Then, based on the page's ID, I retrieve the proper content.
To also give your users an admin page, add a Page Tab Edit URL in your app configuration where you can redirect your users to a custom panel where they can edit their app.